Most manufacturers have a lens that gets bundled with their cameras to make a ‘Kit’, and Nikon is no exception, but when its full frame cameras are beginning to be accessible to the consumer market, the kit lens needs both coverage and quality to be an appropriate partner to the likes of a Nikon D600.

A decade has elapsed between the launches of these two lenses but the specification and performance are little changed other than that the new lens has had ‘Vibration Reduction’ built into it. Both lenses are built to cover full frame 35mm, they will also work on Nikon’s APS-C (DX) bodies giving an effective focal length range of 36mm-127.5mm. The optical designs, though similar are not the same: the IFED lens had 15 elements (including one aspherical), in 12 groups while the VR lens sports 16 elements (three of which are aspherical), in 11 groups. Both include one ED (Extra-low Dispersion) element. The old lens utilized internal focusing (IF) which has not been carried on in the new lens, but it does, as we mentioned have Vibration reduction: Nikon claim a four-stop advantage for its VRII system, allowing for hand-held use in very low light.

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Comments

Thanks!

Many thanks for the review. One question about these measurement: are the sharpness results reported for a certain distance taken from single spot or averaged over all points at that distance?The reason I'm asking is that I've used several copies of the lens and they all had unusualy high decentering with at least one of the quarters of the image looking much worse than the other ones. This is most obvious at the long end of the zoom and can be also seen in many other tests done online.

First replies for this comment

Re: Thanks!

Great question, I hope you get an answer. My experience is that lenses aren't all 'perfect' they are arguably good, but some sort of 'averaging' analysis would be great, whether that is for different areas of the image or focus distance, or even different units.

The bottom line is that these analyses are good, and permit reasonable inter lens comparisons. On the basis of DxOMark's analysis for the Nikkor 24-85 VR, and a similar analysis of the Nikkor 24-120 f4 VR, there was no reason to go for the far more expensive 24-120. This was particularly the case when I was able to pick up an unopened 24-85 VR for about $900 less than the 24-120 from an individual who bought the D600 package with the free 24-85, and wanted to get some of his original purchase price back.

I'd love to see more detail on the testing procedure, but at some point you need to just move ahead and do the best with what you have and can afford.